Once their boat was fastened to the man-of-war, they slithered onto the wreckage, crawling along the caved-in deck and cracked beams, which continued to break apart even as the men were perched on top of them. As the explorers inched along the sunken ruins, they saw, down in the water, the corpses of their compatriots floating between the decks; one misstep, and they would join them. “The difficulties we had to encounter in these visits to the wreck cannot be easily described,” Byron wrote.
